2009 Resolution: Let's Do Support for Webcomic Publishing in Drupal Right

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xerexes's picture

Let's start the discussion anew for 2009. After some minor tinkering in the fall (and again this month) I'm positive that we can create a recipe for publishing webcomics on the Drupal platform. To the extent there is any other active energy in the Drupal community interested in supporting this effort I sincerely hope we can all work together towards this goal.

Here's who I am: Xaviar Xerexes, publisher of ComixTalk.com (on Drupal since 2006 and on version 6 since the beginning of 2008). I have a very clear sense of what goes into a webcomics publishing CMS having reviewed a lot of them and used many of them myself.

Here's (see below) what we need to (i) meet in terms of functionality and then (ii) surpass if we want Drupal to take off in the webcomics publishing community (which is largely the same as the webcomics creator community since much of it is self-published). Instead of listing out functions (but we can do that later) let me point out two links that can show you what a good, functional webcomic site looks like:

  1. Comicpress theme on Wordpress (at http://mindfaucet.com/comicpress/). The introduction of the comicpress theme for the Wordpress CMS (and largely b/c of the active support of developer Tyler Martin) has swept the webcomics area. It is quickly become a dominant platform. For one example of an install of it - see very popular site PvP at http://www.pvponline.com/ (I should note that Brad Hawkins also has a very good plug-in for Wordpress that makes publishing webcomics on it very easy but it doesn't seem to have caught on like Comicpress.)

  2. Ubersoft (at http://ubersoft.net/) Christopher Wright put his webcomic on Drupal 5 and it looks and works great. This is the template for what we should be doing with Drupal.

I feel like we now have the module support in D6 to do what Wright did in D5. By keeping an eye on Comicpress we can learn from Wright's efforts to create a system in D6 that (1) works and (2) is simple enough for creators to install themselves. Ultimately I think there are a lot of reasons Drupal can out-do Wordpress in the long-run but for now I think it would be great just to get Drupal into the battle here.

I have no intention of working on the existing webcomics module (and really it doesn't look like it's been actively developed since the D4 version) because you can achieve the webcomic platform on Drupal through CCK, Views and a few other key modules such as Custom Pagers. Ultimately this is the better way to go as these component modules are actively developed (and ultimately might become part of core) I have gone ahead with an initial install of modules on my own site altertainment.net to tweak and experiment out the right recipe for D6.

The key ones just to get things up and running are CCK, Views and Custom Pagers are Imagefield and Filefield. Maybe the best first step would be to create a wiki page here with the recipe of modules and an accompanying explanation of what they contribute? I want to start something collective here to share what I sort out but also to gather insights from anyone else willing to help and also to better identify if there are any small tweaks to existing modules that would greatly improve their useability for this effort. Than we can figure out how to get those tweaks done (either directly or perhaps finding someone to take on a specific project)

Ideas? Interest in working on this? I plan to post regularly here and at altertainment.net until I get this done...

Comments

I've gone back and forth for

kingandy's picture

I've gone back and forth for some time on single-module-vs-multiple-modules (or "module vs instructions", which I guess is what it would become). I can definitely see the appeal of installing a single module that provides image attachment functionality, classification and volume-chapter-title breakdowns (which become increasingly useful the larger your comics get) and so forth. However, at the same time, I appreciate there's little sense starting over when the work has basically all been done by other developers. After all, when you get down to it, a webcomic is just a set of images sorted into chronological order. All the rest is gravy.

In addition to the modules mentioned above, Scheduler seems like an obvious addition for anyone who doesn't want to have to be online to update their comics manually. And there's a definite case for ImageCache (which in my experience is better than the Image module's pre-generation of thumbnails - it seems to be more robust, and easily accommodates changes or additions to the thumbnail presets).

I think the best argument in

xerexes's picture

I think the best argument in favor of instructions is that there is active development on many more general purpose modules that can be put to work for a webcomics site. We have not had consistent development of a webcomics-specific module.

I am using Scheduler and ImageCache at altertainment.net - both are key!

Seems like a start.

majortom's picture

Have a few friends that publish Webcomics. It would be really nice to get them up on Drupal. A simple tutorial to get it started would be good.

/carmi

I am still tinkering with my

xerexes's picture

I am still tinkering with my site altertainment.net and when I'm happy with it I'll be trying to finish up the wiki page with "instructions". Ultimately I'm going to try and write an install profile for this.

Multiple Modules are better

ubersoft's picture

I'm in favor of multiple modules for pretty much one reason: they're already out there and they already work. Creating a single catch-all module is convenient for the end user but it requires a maintainer to duplicate functionality that already exists for Drupal.

Instructions

a.bond's picture

Here's a set of instructions for making a webcomic in 6.x. http://www.tutorials.lawrencehost.com/node/1

webcomic instructions moved

robhamm-gdo's picture

I've moved the instructions from lawrencehost to http://robhamm.com/tutorials-and-essays/website-building-and-administrat...
Still in the process of rewriting a bit, redoing the images, reinserting, etc. If anyone has suggestions, I'm open.

Incidentally, I agree that imagecache is great for a webcomic site, but since my tutorial is geared toward Drupal newbies, I'm focusing on what I consider the bare bones first, and then adding a section on tricking out a webcomic site, in which I'd include imagecache, methods of easily llinking comics to character bios (core taxonomy and Node Auto Term), etc.

I still want to someday fix up my comic (on the same site) to take advantage of some painful lessons... sigh

Just thought of a way to make it simple...

robhamm-gdo's picture

Sorry but the double-post, but I just had an epiphany.

First--The part that most people seem to get stuck on is Views, so I was thinking, why not just distribute a custom View, and all people would have to do with the view would be go and set their comic term for it and redirect their front page to the page display (if they want their comic on their front page)?

Then I had another epiphany. This could indeed be a custom module, and one so simple that even someone of my minimal skills could work on it.

Modules already create their own tables and insert data, so how difficult would it be to build one with the following characteristics?
Dependencies
Views
Custom pagers
CCK
Filefield
Imagefield

and possibly
FileField Paths
Token
Scheduler

What it would do
Create a custom view set to fields (so it can be assigned a Custom Pager)
Create and assign a Custom Pager
Set the view to fields
Add a comic content type with the required fields already in place

I imagine it would even be possible to have a configuration interface which would ask the user for the desired vocabulary name, the comic name, etc. (and have it create the comic taxonomy), and make it all happen automagically. The module could even be disabled once creation was done, until and unless they wanted to put another comic on the site. Theoretically, they should even be able to update to new versions of the dependency modules without breaking anything.

Thoughts?

Webcomics

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